Celebrate the 15th anniversary of The Elder Scrolls II: Daggerfall by playing it for free

On this date in 1996 Bethesda Softworks released The Elder Scrolls II: Daggerfall. Available only for MS-DOS it required a 90MHz Pentium processor, 32MB RAM, and 200MB of disk space. Today, it celebrates its 15th anniversay while fans wait patiently for the release of the 5th installment of the series: Skyrim.

While the anniversary could easily pass unnoticed, it’s possible for you to relive your experience from 1996 when the game first appeared, or play it for the first time right now. That’s because in 2009 Bethesda made the game free to download and play from the official Elder Scrolls website.

The 148MB zip file download contains the game and detailed instructions on how to play it. This is the original game, so you will require DOSBox to get the exectuble running. Other than that, it’s a pretty straightforward process to enter the 15-year-old world of Daggerfall.

As the follow-up to The Elder Scrolls: Arena it managed to garner an M rating unlike its predecessor. The game had 6 endings to discover and although no modding tools were shipped, such was the enthusiasm for the title that players produced their own. Subsequent new content eventually appeared as well as bug fixes released for the original game.

If you’ve never played the game before, but are a fan of more recent games in the series, there’s no better time to start playing. It will remind you of the early days in the series while managing to fill many hours in the run up to the release of Skyrim.